“No,” he said, “it will not be useless.”
She considered this also, and took the broader meaning that such acts are not wasted.
“What do you intend to try to do?” she asked.
He smiled a little.
“To listen to as much as you care to tell me, Honora.”
She looked at him again, and an errant thought slipped in between her larger anxieties. Wherever he went, how extraordinarily he seemed to harmonize with his surroundings. At Silverdale, and in the drawing-room of the New York house, and in the little parlour in this far western town. What was it? His permanence? Was it his power? She felt that, but it was a strange kind of power—not like other men's. She felt, as she sat there beside him, that his was a power more difficult to combat. That to defeat it was at once to make it stronger, and to grow weaker. She summoned her pride, she summoned her wrongs: she summoned the ego which had winged its triumphant flight far above his kindly, disapproving eye. He had the ability to make her taste defeat in the very hour of victory. And she knew that, when she fell, he would be there in his strength to lift her up.
“Did—did they tell you to come?” she asked.
“There was no question of that, Honora. I was away when—when they learned you were here. As soon as I returned, I came.”
“Tell me how they feel,” she said, in a low voice.
“They think only of you. And the thought that you are unhappy overshadows all others. They believe that it is to them you should have come, if you were in trouble instead of coming here.”